The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “… all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in the world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”
He wrote this in response to a trip he had taken to India, where he witnessed masses of poor going to sleep hungry. He realized at that moment, that his struggle, with his people, was one and the same as the struggle in India. He saw that solving problems as they relate to you is not to solve them – G-d gives us problems so we can see that the entire world has these problems. He affects and afflicts us so that we may see that the world is afflicted and so that we may pray and act on behalf of all mankind.
And this message is in the Torah, as Hashem said “You shall not afflict the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” Hashem let us suffer in Egypt so that we might be compassionate toward the sufferings of the world.
Somehow, in the canonization of the Jewish calendar, MLK Day didn’t make it on. Even in America, it has become for the most part just another day off, somewhere between Veterans Day and Columbus Day. But this day is especially important for Jews – to remember that we are not the only people that have suffered (despite what some might try to say) – and to remember our role in the world, our role as harbingers of all suffering, to use what power we have to alert the world, to stand up, to stand with.
We must realize, as Abraham Yehoshua Heschel did – there is only one cause in the world. Yes, it does refract and take different shapes, but genocide in Rwanda should be as offensive to us as those who have attempted to eliminate us. There is only one hate, and takes many forms, and as long as it shows Its ugly face, we are all victims.
Rav Gavriel Goldfeder
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Rav Gavriel Goldfeder is one of the first semicha recipients of the yeshiva. A graduate of Drew University in Religious Studies, he came to Bat Ayin after stints in other yeshivot and found a spiritual and intellectual home. Here he met his wife, Ketriellah, who was a student in our short-lived Women's Yeshiva. Upon graduation, Gavriel took the position of rabbi of the Aish Kodesh Congregation in Boulder, Colorado and together with Ketriellah and their growing family, they are busy creating (in Gavriel's words), "a community infused with Torah values, passion for learning and prayer, consideration of one another, and action, as well as deep celebration of the joys of life." |